Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

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Writers are collectors

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You may not find a series of shelves massed with tiny figurines or thirty-odd tennis racquets mounted on the wall and never used, but we’re collectors.  We keep scraps of images, places, phrases, and emotions.  Some of us organize them in neat rows on revolving memories deep in our subconscious while others of us let them tumble about getting stuck together, so we can just reach in and grab a clump.  But we are constantly collecting from the world of experience around us.

pine resin, cool breeze, the heavy alarm of cicadas

I have lived all over the US, visited abroad a few times, and I can smell and hear these places no matter what current place is about me. In my mind the Narraganset trail lays out before me, twisting eagerly toward the Oregon Trail which I also know well in parts.  Standing on the deck of a ferry moving between Seattle, Washington, and Victoria, Canada, I can feel the rumble beneath my feet, the stiff breeze dragging at my ponytailed hair, the stacks of tandem bicycles filling the lower deck, row after row of them.  I can still see the riders standing about chatting in their matching jerseys and riding shoes that clicked in awkward careful steps that seemed to lean the riders slightly back on their heals.

I recall the day I moved into a new house when I was nine years old.  We moved often, and I had formed the habit of running outside to check out the neighborhood the moment I was excused by my parents.  I would peer up and down the street searching for children near my size and age.  This day I looked beyond the cul-de-sac I lived in, across the connecting main road into another cul-de-sac.  Three little girls were playing in the street.  I don’t remember how I introduced myself, but I do remember they greeted me warmly, and we played until twilight and the street lights began to flicker on, which was my signal to return home.  We agreed to play again the next day, to be life long friends.  Just as I was about to head home, one girl asked me if I was Catholic.  I admitted that I was Lutheran.  Suddenly, the girls became a wall, shoulder to shoulder in front of me.  One girl stated quite dismissively that they were not to play with children who were not Catholic.  They left me standing in the middle of that cul-de-sac watching their stiff little backs as they strode away.

I didn’t go home despondent; I was confused.  We had had a lovely day playing together, and one word had changed everything.  The next day I met two girls who lived several blocks away but were far more willing to enjoy lovely days with me regardless of my faith.  All six of us took the same bus, but I don’t think I ever talked or even glanced at those three cul-de-sac girls again.  I wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t angry.  But that moment of separation is saved inside me.

We writers gather these moments, and somehow they grow into stories, poems, essays, novels, and histories because we never stop looking at them, turning them about in our minds, viewing them from different angles, remembering tastes, textures, sensations of the moment.  We are connoisseurs of memory and experience.

What have you collected recently?

#writers
#memories

Tuesday prompt: #33 2012

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Today you’ll practice settings. Choose two opposing settings, such as a beach and mountainous area.  Think of a specific place and don’t pick the obvious time of year. Winter on the Atlantic Seaboard leaves the beach looking far different than summer.  The waves on a particularly chilly day can actually become frozen mid-crest coming in to shore. It looks like an ice sculpture all along the beach edge thawing out as the ocean keeps rolling in, but the frozen crust of a frigid crest remains in place.  The sand crunches like broken glass, and the salt air stings your face.  As for mountains, the Cuyamaca Mountains in California are far different from the Blue Mountains of western Oregon which have a tint of blue gray vagueness and a sense of just being dropped in place without warning or preamble of foothills.  Pick a specific setting, detail it out and then switch to the other.  Flex your descriptive muscles as you change between your chosen dramatic scenes.

Tuesday prompt: #30 2012

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Today you will describe something in detail.  Pick something on your desk or think back on a favorite toy, your first car, the dinner your ordered at a favorite restaurant or the worst pizza you had at a bowling alley in some hokey town you passed through late one night.  Get deep into describing it.  Work it over and over, removing, adding, choosing precise wording.  Don’t stop until you have covered everything.  Then determine the focus and cut to the most profound of your imagery.

Writing and kayaking: where worlds overlap

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Meandering rivers & minds

This past weekend I went kayaking with my husband and daughter.  We parked by a little lake and proceeded to launch our kayaks. Ready to go exploring, we had all been eying the source creek to our left. 

We didn’t get far into the creek before the lake disappeared and all sounds common to a lake full of campers were so dimmed that only the birds, movement of water and occasional flying wasp were heard.  I had deliberately let my husband and daughter slide on ahead of me and pass beyond the next curve just so I could take in that feeling that I was somewhere far from civilization. 

Along the banks were tight growths of trees, many of which have been undercut by resent high water flow, some having fallen partially across the creek added to the untouched feel of the place.  The cardinals and black ducks complained at our presence, and the fish were well camouflaged by the turbid water. 

I allowed the pretense of being utterly alone soak in.  Much of the sky was blocked by the canopy of trees overhead, but what showed was pale blue with occasional slashes of white clouds.  We had set out on a windy day, yet on that creek, no breeze stirred the trees, and along some lengths of the meandering river even the water was torpid and silty, where slender, curved leaves floated in stillness.

This same sense of being alone and in a untenanted place happens when I write.  The rest of the room I am in disappears and just the images filling the screen in front of me and the soft clack of the keyboard are my world.  I suppose that is why I enjoy kayaking alone so much, even if only a turn in the river up ahead creates the illusion.  The two experiences mirror each other.  I am exploring an unknown space of my own creation, my imagination building up a world.  But like the turn of the river ahead, a turn of my chair brings family up close again.